![]() Serious technical challenges with using smartphones for contact tracing also increase that risk. These factors increase the risk of generating too many exposure notifications to be useful. In May the CDC estimated that 40 percent of new COVID-19 infections come from asymptomatic carriers. may someday reach the point where cases are once again sporadic rather than widespread, but for now experts recommend concentrating contact tracing on contacts within households, healthcare and other high-risk settings, and case clusters - an approach much more amenable to manual contact tracing.ģ. A large proportion of transmissible infections are from people without symptoms. As the Minnesota report puts it, “contact tracing is most effective either early in the course of an outbreak or much later in the outbreak when other measures have reduced disease incidence to low levels.” The U.S. In the United States, as of this writing (July 2020), there are currently around 50,000 new coronavirus cases being identified every day. The infection rate in a community is high. One cough or sneeze from a stranger may be enough to infect an unlucky passerby - as can sharing an interior space with a “ super-spreader” who is on the other side of a large room.Ģ. Compared to the kind of contact tracing that has long been done with HIV, where transmission takes place through sex or blood, the virus that causes COVID-19 is much harder to track. Respiratory transmission appears to be the primary way COVID-19 is transmitted. Contacts are difficult to trace, such as when a disease is transmitted through the air. As a group of prominent epidemiologists from the University of Minnesota explained in a report on contact tracing, contact tracing is less effective when:ġ. That problem is made worse by the fact that COVID-19 is a more difficult disease to trace than many. Ultimately, people will stop taking the notifications seriously, or just uninstall the app. As one commentator put it, “actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have.” Swamping users with false notifications would be useless and annoying at best, and seriously disruptive and counterproductive at worst. The first problem - the danger of generating far too many “exposure notifications” - is considerable. And those memories, relayed to human contact tracers, are more likely to identify a patient’s significant past exposures than an automated app that can’t determine, for example, whether two people were separated by glass or a wall. Those are the kinds of contacts that people are likely to remember. On the other, if it is confined to reporting sustained close contacts of the kind that are most likely to result in transmission, the tool is not likely to improve upon old-fashioned human contact tracing. On the one hand, a tool shouldn’t pick up every fleeting encounter and swamp users with too many meaningless notifications. Specifically, such tracing appears to be squeezed from two directions. Other problems with technology-assisted contact tracing have become more apparent as the pandemic has played out. Those systems are all inadequate in the United States today. ![]() And even the most comprehensive, all-seeing contact tracing system is of little use without social and medical systems in place to help those who may have the virus - including access to medical care, testing, and support for those who are quarantined. Smartphone ownership is not evenly distributed by income, race, or age, threatening to create disparate effects from such schemes. Some of the problems with tech-assisted contact tracing have been apparent from the beginning, such as the social dimensions of the challenge. Indeed, a number of serious institutions began working on this concept early in the pandemic, most notably Apple and Google, which have already implemented a version of the concept in their mobile operating systems. We have said from the outset that location-based contact tracing was untenable, but that the concept of “proximity tracking” - in which Bluetooth signals emitted by phones are used to notify people who may have been exposed - seemed both more plausible and less of a threat to privacy. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the principal coronavirus health needs. Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight COVID-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |